Reply #21: After about a week of this, I've reached the conclusion that the best way to learn Arch

[struggle4progress]

might be to install it five or ten times over the course of another week or two, experimenting with different choices for various steps, in order to get a feel for what works best

My current AAO install is disappointingly slow

There are also often peculiar problems when installing packages: for example, the installed package appears in the gnome menus but won't launch from there without further work, or it doesn't appear in the menus and has to be added -- but further work is required to get it to launch from the menu when added

Arch is not incredibly user friendly. The supported repository is a bit thin. If you want to install debian packages, for example, you either figure out how to do it by hand, or you trustingly wander over to the vast collection of unsupported user-supplied packages in AUR to do something like install yaourt and then use yaourt to install dpkg